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America’s Cup Team Pushes Forward Through Grief

An Artemis AC72 catamaran flipped and broke into pieces during training in San Francisco Bay on May 9, killing the Olympic gold medalist Andrew Simpson of Britain.Credit
Noah Berger/Associated Press

How do you race in the bay where your crewmate died? How do you process the loss and, in some cases, the guilt? How do you take the risk necessary to win on the same type of high-speed catamaran when risk led to so much shock and pain so recently, on May 9?

That was the day Artemis Racing’s first America’s Cup yacht flipped and broke into pieces in San Francisco Bay with fatal consequences, as the British sailor Andrew Simpson was trapped underwater beneath the wreckage.

Officials and sailors from Artemis have spoken little publicly of the accident and its aftermath, but the team is beginning to emerge as it races to prepare its new yacht to compete in at least some phase of the America’s Cup challenger series next month.

The accident was “a classic capsize situation,” said Loick Peyron, one of the team’s two helmsmen. He confirmed that the yacht capsized, as has been reported, while the Artemis crew was executing a bear-away maneuver: a downwind turn away from the breeze that has been a particular challenge in this class of Cup boats.

“There was a bit too much wind, and the boat itself in our case didn’t have enough lifting force from the foil or from the dagger boards, and that’s why all the bear-aways since the beginning were quite tricky,” Peyron said.

Peyron, a 53-year-old from France who is one of the most experienced and successful multihull sailors in history, was, unusually, not on board but was following closely in a chase boat. He said the yacht “pitchpoled” — a term used when a multihull’s bows dig into the water and the stern flips up and over the bows. Peyron said that, contrary to some reports, the boat did not break before it capsized.

“We read a lot of false stories about that,” he said. “The boat breaks after, or should I say during, but the capsize was already on its way. After that for sure what is unacceptable is that the boat broke.”

Asked if Simpson’s problems were a result of the boat’s breaking up, Peyron said, “Yes, exactly.”

“That’s the worst case, for sure,” Peyron said. “Because he was trapped not under the net but between the beams and the wing.”

Seven weeks later, the sailing team Simpson left behind is still working to get its second boat in the water, still working to regain its collective equilibrium and confidence. The members of the sailing team made the trip to Britain for Simpson’s funeral on May 31 in his home city, Sherborne.

“It’s still very difficult, for sure,” Peyron said. “It’s still very difficult because we know we lost a friend, and because we know we lost a friend because of a structure failure, we need to be confident again in that structure.”

The exact cause of Simpson’s death remains undetermined pending the issuance of a report by the San Francisco medical examiner.

To address the structural concerns, the team is preparing to put its new AC72 catamaran through stress tests at its base in Alameda, Calif. The boat will be inverted inside a hangar, without its huge wing sail attached, and subjected to the sorts of loads that destroyed the first AC72.

Photo

The British sailor Andrew Simpson was trapped underwater beneath the wreckage and died.Credit
Herbert Knosowski/Associated Press

Paul Cayard, the longtime America’s Cup sailor from the United States who is Artemis’s chief executive, said the tests would be conducted in early July and had been designed with suggestions from competing teams.

“Those tests could take three days; they could take six,” Cayard said. “It’s hard to pinpoint; just suffice to say we’re anxious to get the boat on the water. We won’t cut any corners, though, for safety.”

Cayard, like Peyron, was in a chase boat when the accident occurred. He spoke at length in a telephone interview about the challenges facing the team after the death of Simpson, a 36-year-old Olympic gold medalist nicknamed Bart, who was the father of two young children.

“The events of May 9 were a huge setback not only from the human side but also from the physical side,” Cayard said. “We lost a boat, and we lost a wing, so we are really up against it in this goal of getting us a boat and a wing on the racecourse. It’s a steep hill, and it’s a huge challenge. But our options were to keep going with the challenge or say, ‘We’d had enough.’ And nobody really felt like saying, ‘We’re not going to give it our all.’ That’s the kind of people we are, and most successful people are.”

With the delay caused by the accident, Artemis no longer plans to participate in the initial round-robin phase of the America’s Cup challengers series, which is scheduled to begin next Sunday with the two other challengers: Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa.

Instead, Artemis, which has been training in much smaller yachts on San Francisco Bay, will attempt to get its second and now only Cup yacht ready by the start of the knockout round Aug. 6.

Cayard said there had been only a few departures from his team of about 130 employees since the accident. Artemis’s first boat was already at a competitive disadvantage in that, unlike other teams’ yachts, it did not fully hydrofoil, or sail with both hulls out of the water while “flying” on L-shape dagger boards.

Artemis’s second boat is expected to have that capacity, and though its competitors now have significant advantages in preparation — and two fully functional boats in the case of Team New Zealand and the Cup defender Oracle Team USA — Cayard said he still believed his team had a chance to win the America’s Cup in September.

“I’m competing in this right now, so I’m not the right guy to ask,” he said. “You should go ask somebody in Las Vegas, a bookmaker or something, what they think because they are looking at it cold and sterile without three years of their heart invested in the thing. Of course I think we can win, and everybody on this team believes we can win.”

On the day of the accident, the team was conducting training exercises with Oracle Team USA.

“It was a classic bear-away, and the plan was to do another lineup with Oracle because we were lining up for a few hours with them,” Peyron said. “The pity was that this was the last sailing session for this boat, the last one, and we were really happy.”

A spokesman for Artemis later explained that the team’s second boat had arrived that week and that the team was then about to shift its focus to preparing it to sail, with the first boat still available for training.

The accident is still being investigated by the San Francisco Police Department. Peyron said he believed part of the problem with Artemis’s first Cup boat was that “the shape of the beam itself was not exactly the best one and the easiest one to calculate, and that’s not a matter of building, because it was well built.”

Artemis’s boat was designed by Juan Kouyoumdjian, who is from Argentina, and who has had great success designing monohull yachts, including two winners of the Volvo Ocean Race.

“But you know at some stage we all are playing with the limits everywhere, with the safety factor limits or material strengths,” Peyron said. “In your formula, you need to choose numbers at some stage or to choose what is the percentage of strength you give to, let’s say, a ply of carbon. If you agree with the fact it’s supposed to break with some load and then you take half of that, of the safety one, for the working load or you take a third, it makes a huge difference at the end.”

Photo

Paul Cayard, the chief executive of Artemis Racing, was in a chase boat when the deadly accident occurred. The team, he said, “won’t cut any corners” for safety.Credit
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Peyron said the French structural engineer Herve Devaux had been working intensely on updating and safety-proofing the new boats. “Right now we’re adding a lot of lamination on the beams and everywhere to really match with a lot higher safety factor,” Peyron said.

In the aftermath of Simpson’s death, America’s Cup organizers have issued 37 safety recommendations. The four teams have agreed on most of those changes, but sticking points remain, and Luna Rossa Challenge, the Italian syndicate, has threatened to take legal action, long an America’s Cup staple.

“It’s never great, and here at the 11th hour, it’s probably worse,” Cayard said. “That’s not what the event needs, but again, I can’t worry about that. We have done our best to move the process forward, and we agreed to abide by all the recommendations.”

Peyron said he still believed the adjusted wind limits — 20 knots for the first phase of the challenger series — were too high and that the five-minute window for measuring them too long. He also said more could be done to make the boats easier to steer.

Cayard declined to discuss the specifics of the accident. “To me, everything that happened that day apart from Bart’s death is sort of detail,” he said, explaining that he needed to focus his energy on the present and the future.

But Cayard, a 54-year-old from San Francisco, did acknowledge that this had been the toughest moment of his long career, which has included victory in the Volvo Ocean Race and multiple America’s Cup campaigns.

“Like with all things, you take the good with the bad and the difficult with the easy,” he said. “Life is variable that way. So this is a challenging one, and we’re certainly not done with this yet. We’re focused on getting on the racetrack. I could be sitting here in two months saying, ‘Man can you believe how that all turned out?’ I think that’s the spirit of a competitor. It’s just never over until it’s truly over, and we’re nowhere near being done with this thing yet.”

Cayard reaffirmed his faith in two of the key sailors who were on board and in charge May 9: the helmsman Nathan Outteridge and the skipper Iain Percy, both Olympic gold medalists.

Outteridge, a 27-year-old from Australia, was steering the boat during the accident. Percy, 37, was one of Simpson’s closest friends and his former Olympic sailing partner in the Star class.

Cayard said Outteridge would remain the team’s principal helmsman with Peyron as his backup. Cayard said Outteridge had never expressed a desire to step down.

“Nathan’s obviously a guy who I spent quite a bit of time with in the aftermath of May 9, because he is young, and he was in a position of responsibility, just like Iain Percy was, well, just like we all were,” Cayard said. “But anyway, I spent time with him, and he always seemed solid to me, and obviously a person of that kind of success has a certain amount of confidence about him. But he’s prudent, and so I think no, there never was a hesitation there. He was 100 percent in.”

Peyron, who has also been put in charge of safety for Artemis, said he believed that continuing was the right move even if he believes the AC72 class and its wing sail are too big and overpowered.

“I can’t say the show must go on because that’s not exactly my reasoning,” he said. “But there is a story here, and maybe with bad moments like these, you can build the future. You can’t progress if you don’t do any mistakes.

“So for sure we’ve done one all together, and we have to feel responsible — not guilt, but responsible.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 2013, on page SP11 of the New York edition with the headline: America’s Cup Team Pushes Forward Through Grief. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe